Dynamic load management of virtual machines in cloud architectures

Cloud infrastructures must accommodate changing demands for different types of processing with heterogeneous workloads and time constraints. In a similar context, dynamic management of virtualized application environments is becoming very important to exploit computing resources, especially with recent virtualization capabilities that allow live sessions to be moved transparently between servers. This paper proposes novel management algorithms to decide about reallocations of virtual machines in a cloud context characterized by large numbers of hosts. The novel algorithms identify just the real critical instances and take decisions without recurring to typical thresholds. Moreover, they consider load trend behavior of the resources instead of instantaneous or average measures. Experimental results show that proposed algorithms are truly selective and robust even in variable contexts, thus reducing system instability and limit migrations when really necessary. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010.